After the news that George Nolfi would be the new writer on Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's New Jedi Order film, it's only fitting that outlets want to get whatever details they can about the upcoming film starring Daisy Ridley as Rey Skywalker. Film Stories did just that, asking the writer about how he approached the new position while speaking to him about his new movie Elevation.
Nolfi, who has written for the Jason Bourne films as well as the heist movie Ocean's 12, has a love for politics and studied that and philosophy in the past. It's part of what pulled him towards George Lucas' work, which, remember folks, is well documented to always be political. George Lucas has stated that these are "themes that run all the way through Star Wars," with America being the Empire for the original trilogy and him being against George Bush-era policies during the prequel trilogies.
These ideas have resonated with Nolfi, as he explained to Film Stories:
"If you think about George Lucas, the six movies that he did, and the universe that he created, it’s actually very steeped in broad notions of politics. It’s not talking about today, per se, but there’s the Empire’s Nazism slash Roman Empire. The democracy of the Roman Empire collapsing and becoming an empire and the perennial story of human beings organising themselves and against chaos, and then the tools that help human societies tamp down on chaos becomes oppression. So that is really very core to what I think George Lucas was trying to talk about. And one of the wonderful things about science fiction and Star Wars – which is more almost science fantasy or space opera – is that you can raise the deepest issues without it feeling like a philosophy class, or a political science class, or something I read in the newspaper today… It can be about real things, deep things."George Nolfi, Film Stories
We've seen this continue from George's vision in different ways throughout the series. Andor has been hailed as one of the most progressive and timely series to ever come out of the franchise. But even the smallest series focuses on these ideas. Young Jedi Adventures, the preschool show, is a very political series, introducing ideas like problems of deforestation, colonialism, gentrification, and capitalism, just to name a few things.
In turn, what might some of this mean for the Rey Skywalker movie? Director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has been a longtime documentary filmmaker, which makes the writer with a political studies background quite fitting for the team. While Nolfi couldn't speak to the plot of the New Jedi Order film, he did discuss the process of what he can bring to the upcoming movie.
"The way I approach it is, you look at what’s come before you, you look at the broad ideas of what they want to do. Meaning: Lucasfilm, Disney, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the director, and then you do what a writer does, and try to try and put beats of a story together. Try and imagine characters, and then you present that with an understanding that it needs to honour, obviously, a long, incredible tradition."George Nolfi, Film Stories
While at first, I was a bit on the fence about Nolfi being named as the writer for the movie, the more I hear him speak and his thoughts on the franchise, sign me up. He gets it. He gets Lucas' vision of what Star Wars is for and how it should function. This interview has made me even more excited to see what's coming.